Radar Love
by hakuen
Summary: Love is a battlefield.


**Notes:**

For indecisive_penguin on tumblr and ao3. The original prompt is listed at the bottom.

 **Thanks to cazzy and the blast for all of your support and encouragement!**

—

* * *

Kylo Ren had fully intended to go after Rey the moment he woke up in the med bay of the Finalizer. It wasn't his fault that the Supreme Leader had different plans.

There was a delay of a few weeks before they could leave for the Supreme Leader's location. He had the misfortune of spending it at the new main base of the First Order, cooped up inside, restless to the point of danger. And in the third week, he felt her. _She_ had come to _him_.

* * *

Rey had been on Magnetar Base for 8 days. In that time, she had seen:

Fifteen (15) rooms, including six passageways, two dedicated radar rooms, five communications spaces, the cafeteria and her shared sleeping space;

Twenty-seven (27) people, including five supervisors, eleven stormtroopers, seven fellow technicians, three paper pushers, and one New Guy;

Six (6) droids, including two shiny new protocol droids who swept through behind one of the supervisors, too exquisitely advanced for these surroundings; three GNK series power droids that often startled her with their stomping on the hollow metal deckplates, and one... ah, well, one interrogator droid. It was difficult, but she managed to act as indifferent to it as the techs around her.

And, last for the moment but tragically not least: One (1) new radar technician.

His name, as he had informed her no less than thirty times now, was Matt.

* * *

"You're blocking the light again, Matt," she said crisply, up to her elbows in radar components and unable to pull away just yet. He mumbled something and she heard his feet shuffling, but there was no change. "Move!" This time she turned enough to glare at him from the corner of her eyes.

He was staring at her, mouth half open. No wonder she still couldn't see a thing. Who did one have to kill in order to get decent help around this place?

"Do you _want_ to be stuck here until morning?" There was no possible way that he could become any more useless. None. "I don't know about you, but I rather enjoy my sleep, and I would appreciate it if you could please—"

The set of servos in front of her clunked and rotated into life, a grating whine coming from every rotation of the control servo, but they were _working_ and that was what counted. "Oh!" Her hands flew back by reflex, and Rey stared at the revived equipment. "What in the universe could..."

"Would you like to go to dinner?" Matt's voice intruded from behind her, uneven and rusty, almost as though he had never asked a basic question like that in his life.

"...Yes?" Eyes trained on the servos, which continued to defy all logic as well as physics, she took a Gauss wrench up in one hand and set to work on fine-tuning their response times. "We should likely think about that sometime soon."

"Aren't you done with the," Matt paused, apparently overcome by the challenge of producing coherent language. "Synchro... uh...?"

"No, not nearly yet."

"All right. Yeah. I... I need to go do — " His voice shook and she glanced back to see his eyes almost bulging with the intensity of their focus on — her bracelets? That was a little worrisome, given that they were Force dampeners. She had needed a way to hide from Kylo Ren, and this was all the Resistance could offer. "...The thing. Yes. It's very important. You understand, don't you? It's — it's not that I don't want to stay with you."

After several seconds, she remembered that it was impolite to stare.

He dropped his gaze from her eyes, to her bracelets, to the floor, and bent to collect his bag. Halfway down, he slapped a hand to his rough blond hair for no apparent reason, stumbling a little and catching himself with the other hand on the wall beside her. Very close beside her, in fact, enough that Rey couldn't avoid noticing how large his hand actually was. She tilted her head and looked at him properly for the first time since he had been foisted off on her the previous morning.

"Why do you hunch over that way?" Her voice sounded more abrupt than she had intended.

Matt peered down at her from behind his blocky glasses, strawlike hair sticking out around his face, the bag dangling from his free hand. "If I didn't, you might be afraid."

This time, she didn't stop staring until he had long since disappeared down the hallway.

* * *

At her usual seat in the cafeteria was a bouquet. Or rather — a sheaf of very precisely folded papers that could be interpreted as such.

"Don't you like flowers?" She could hear Matt breathing behind her.

"I... love them. Actually." Rey frowned. Matt's breathing rasped to a halt. She tipped her head to the side after a moment, and considered the bouquet. "It's quite impressive. I don't know why someone would spend so much time and then leave them lying around somewhere." She heard the rasp of breath start up again behind her, but in uneven patterns, and... she was much too close to Matt, she really was.

She stepped to the side and walked off to collect her dinner. When she returned, there was a card wedged beneath the bouquet, but not a Matt in sight.

* * *

Somewhere along the way, Kylo Ren had lost sight of his priorities here. Somewhere in the last several days of trailing along behind her, hands occupied with bags and stepstools and only rarely a tool, he had forgotten that he was supposed to be playing with her like a cat with a mouse, and had instead become the one being played.

That was what it felt like, at least, when he regained perspective — however briefly — in the safety of his quarters. Staring at his grandfather's helmet, he spread the trembling fingers of one hand out into the space between them. "She is like a puppeteer, and my heart, the puppet. There is no denying the bond between us any longer." His fingers twitched at imaginary strings. "Grandfather. Is there no way to be free of this need? This terrible urge to fulfill her every whim and wish, only to see her smile?" He withdrew his hand, lifting it up to burrow his fingers beneath the edge of the blond wig.

There were many ways in which he could get out of this situation, but he could think of none in which they could both have their needs fulfilled. Every escape for him ended in her misery, and thus ultimately in his; every escape for her would take heroic feats of contortion and anguish on his part.

He let out a sigh and pressed his hand further beneath the wig, fingertips digging in to scratch at his scalp. At last the wig flew away onto the metal floor, deflating in a gentle yet inevitable motion, much like his pride.

* * *

Sitting on her bunk bed, Rey stared at the envelope in her hand. It was pale pink, made from finely ridged, thick paper, and had her name printed in wobbly block letters on the front.

She felt as though she did a lot of staring these days, but there seemed to be quite a bit in her recent life that demanded it of her. This envelope was no exception. She was ninety percent sure it was from Matt.

"I suppose there's no way out but through," Rey muttered, and slid a finger under the flap of the envelope to rip it open. The paper was surprisingly tough, but in the end, she succeeded.

The card was the same color of pink as the envelope, crisscrossed with hearts of various shades from pink to deep red, and the front said:

ROSES ARE RED  
VIOLETS ARE BLUE  
THE FORCE IS WITH ME  
NOW YOU R2

Her eyebrows snapped together. There were many strange things about Matt, but this sudden bent for poetry had to be one of the strangest. She opened the card to see what gems the inside might yield.

It contained a stick figure of a single person, topped by a golden sun. The right side of the page read:

 _When darkness overwhelms the dawn_  
 _When the light within me is gone_  
 _Me and you still got a thing goin' on_  
 _You are my only hope_

Her breath caught in her throat, chest filling with a tangle of emotions. Her immediate impression was one of great disturbance, but on examining her feelings more closely, she realized she also felt... touched. Matt was extraordinarily odd, there was no doubt about that. But he was also human, and she could respect the effort and courage that this must have taken.

* * *

The mask of Darth Vader had never had much to offer in the way of romantic advice. Kylo's only real knowledge of how to get and keep himself in the good graces of women had come from his father and Uncle Lando, and he suspected they might not have been the best possible role models.

Still, he felt like he had a few more cards up his sleeve. One of his father's main tactics had already been deployed — the flowers — but Uncle Lando had been more of the "go big or go home" type.

It was time. Kylo Ren was going all in.

* * *

The early morning shift at Magnetar was Rey's favorite. She had always been a morning person, loving the peace and coolness just after dawn on Jakku. On this base, there was no such peace to be had, but at least the first few hours of this shift were quiet.

She did her best thinking when her hands were busy, and so she was digging around in that radar cabinet again — it was still a mystery how the servos had snapped into life beneath her hands when she knew for a fact that half the contacts on the control had remained corroded beyond use.

Clomping footsteps sounded behind her. She paused and narrowed her eyes. If she wasn't mistaken, it was Matt, but she had never seen him around so early before. She had assumed that he was a night owl, since even in the early afternoon he seemed grumpy and out of step with the world.

"I wanted to thank you." His voice had the rasp of someone newly woken, and was deeper than usual. She stiffened a little at the sound — it was somehow familiar — but made herself relax again in the next heartbeat.

"You're... welcome?" Rey straightened and wiped her hands on the front of her uniform, then turned toward Matt. As she had suspected, he did seem to be half-asleep, and was swaying a little on his feet. All that was functioning at his typical level was his tunnel-vision stare into her eyes, and even that was a bit dazed.

"Yes." Matt took a step forward, then another, close enough now to loom over her. He reached out a hand, then drew it back, fumbled with something in one of the many pockets of his orange vest and held it out to her.

She looked down. His arm was wobbling around but she could see a square box, wrapped around with fluffy pink ribbon. Rey didn't know what to say.

Several moments passed. Matt's breathing grew harsher in the silence. She didn't know whether he was waiting for her to talk first, but she was going to continue waiting for him to talk first, because she was still at a loss for words.

At last he spoke. " _Take it._ " The words were gritted out between his teeth, shockingly loud, and she jumped a little even though she had been expecting it.

Rey's eyes snapped back up to his, lips parted in preparation for telling him off — and —

If she hadn't spent so much time with him now, she would think he was a heartbeat away from violence. Instead, what she saw in his face was _terror_. The tiny muscles at his left temple were twitching, his face was cardboard stiff, but his eyes were filled with the kind of fear she had only seen in those facing death.

She accepted the box from him with slow, gentle hands. He was shaking, and she let him gather himself without comment, focusing on the box. It was covered in thin ivory paper, shot through with gold threads. There was also a great deal of fluffy pink ribbon, tied in an elaborate, only slightly squashed bow.

"It's very, ah." She groped for words. He seemed to be holding his breath now. "Very nice. I love what you've done with the ribbon."

Matt shifted on his feet and cleared his throat. "Thank you." There was a pause in which it seemed like he was going to add more, but in the end he just cleared his throat again, hands twitching at his sides.

The best course seemed to be getting this done before Matt had a complete meltdown in front of her, so she tugged the ribbon loose and carefully undid the paper — it had been folded in such a way as to stay, rather than being taped or glued, and she took a moment to admire the precise work, glancing over at him with a genuine, if small, smile. His expression shifted to something approaching awe and Rey looked back to the box quickly.

She lifted the lid of the box and blinked. Inside were a pair of bracelets.

They were made of what she was pretty sure had to be real aurodium, which was a less than comfortable idea in itself, but the craftsmanship was breathtaking. The curve of each piece was formed of thin, woven strips of dark golden metal, every strip engraved in a different pattern of vines and tiny, almost unnoticeable flowers, not a single flower alike. She realized after some time that she was holding her breath, eyes wide on the delicate bangles.

"I can't possibly accept this," she blurted out.

"...What?"

Rey winced and looked up at Matt again. He looked about how she'd expected — somewhere between "punched in the gut" and "about to break things." She realized that even though she felt bad about the first, she had no actual fear that she was in danger from the second.

"It's too — they're just too," Rey tried to come up with words and ended up just gesturing around with her free hand. "I can't believe you can afford such a thing and it's not right." Of course there was rather more to it than that, but she did in fact have some concern there too.

"I can." His eyebrows were drawn together, face dark. "It's fine. _Take_ it."

Their eyes remained locked for a few heartbeats, equally stubborn. At last Rey sighed. She was going to be leaving soon enough and she would simply leave the bracelets in his toolbag or something of that sort. "All right."

His face lit up, so brilliant with hope that it was hard for her to look at. Matt straightened, and it was as though he had suddenly grown several inches and gained the confidence of another three people. She blinked at him — once again there was that odd feeling of familiarity that she had gotten from his voice earlier, but she shushed it again and just tilted her head.

"Would you like to go to dinner?"

This time she caught on. And it wasn't right, truly, but...

"Sure."

—

* * *

 **original prompt:**

 _AU where Matt the Radar Technician and Kitt (Rey undercover) date awkwardly for the few weeks she's on assignment at the First Order's new base (but they're ridiculously sweet, come on). When Rey and Kylo Ren meet up again soon afterwards she notices that he's super depressed and really not into the fight and when they have a mind-meld moment she sees herself as Kitt and realizes that Kylo Ren is Matt and he's moping because she's gone and the ending is up to you. Fluff please._

I did the best I could with that.


End file.
